Barbara Ehrenreich

LIVING WITH A WILD GOD

Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a Creative
Commons Licence.
Barbara Ehrenreich, two of whose previous books I have already reviewed
here, has many talents. She trained as a scientist and obtained a Ph.D
in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University. But she then
changed course and has been active in numerous other areas, especially
feminism and left-wing politics. Throughout her career she has been a
freelance writer, producing a wide variety of books and journalism, for
which she has won many awards.

The present book is quite different from anything she has written
previously. It is based on a journal which she started at the age of
fourteen in 1956 and continued intermittently until 1966. The main
reason for returning to it now is that it included the account of an
ecstatic or mystical experience that happened to her when she was
seventeen. As a rationalist and atheist she had not been able to come to
terms with this and kept it to herself for many years, but now she feels
it is time to try to understand it.

Ehrenreich was brought up as an atheist in a somewhat dysfunctional
family; her father drank heavily and her mother made several suicide
attempts, one of which was ultimately successful. Ehrenreich herself had
psychological problems which she recorded in her journal, where the
entries mainly took the form of surprisingly sophisticated philosophical
discussions with herself about the meaning of life. She adopted a
solipsistic position which discounted the independent existence of other
people, and she began to experience curious episodes of what she
considered—based on reading psychiatric descriptions—to be
depersonalisation or derealisation states.

The ecstatic experience occurred when Ehrenreich was on a skiing weekend
with her younger brother and Dick, a morose school friend. The trip had
been unsatisfactory in various ways from the start and after skiing the
three young people had to spend the night in their car because they had
run out of money. This also meant that they had had very little to eat.

In the early morning Ehrenreich got out of the car, leaving the others
asleep, and walked into the town.

At some point in my predawn walk … the world flamed
into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic
voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere.
Something poured into me and I poured out into it. … It was a
furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through
all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the
experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without
becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry,
you will be recruited into the blaze and made indistinguishable from
the rest of the blaze.

In her final chapter Ehrenreich reflects on this experience and finds
that it challenges her atheism, although in a strange way. She thinks
she was contacted by someone or something which she calls the "Other".
She doesn't know what it was—certainly not "God". She wants to
avoid religious language completely in describing her
experience—she doesn't even know if the Other is benevolent,
malevolent, or neutral. Rather than looking for answers in the literature
of mysticism, she thinks, perhaps she should turn to science fiction.

Science fiction, like religious mythology, can only be a stimulant to
the imagination, but it is worth considering the suggestion it
offers, which is the possibility of a being (or beings) that in some
sense "feeds" off of human consciousness, a being no more visible to us
than microbes were to Aristotle, a being that roams the universe seeking
minds open enough for it to enter or otherwise contact.

Ehrenreich insists that she does not believe this
hypothesis—belief is the wrong term—but she thinks we ought
to admit it as a possibility. Well, perhaps we should, but I think that
if we apply Ockham's razor we can find a simpler alternative. Ehrenreich
has read widely in her quest to understand experiences of this kind,
including the writing of the Christian mystics and William James's
Varieties of Religions Experience, but she doesn't mention the
book which, to my mind, does more to explain these experiences in a
non-religious context than anything else I've read: Marghanita Laski's Ecstasy: A Study of Some
Secular and Religious Experiences.

Laski, though an atheist, attached great importance and value to such
experiences, but she did not believe that they were due to any kind of
contact with another being or external reality. She thought they were
linked to the creative process, and occurred during the resolution of
an inner conflict. This would certainly fit in with Ehrenreich's
intellectual and emotional search for metaphysical insight in the
preceding years.

The title of the book is, I think, not very appropriate. It implies that
Ehrenreich has in some sense "found God". This isn't what she says. At
most in her closing pages she seems to approach a kind of nature
mysticism or even pantheism, but that is something else. Is the title
perhaps a concession to American hostility to atheism?